Monday, November 23, 2015

Executive Summary

The holidays are upon us and the shopping season is kicking into high gear. This year, an estimated 270 million consumers will shop online and, for the first time, more than half of them will use mobile devices to check off their holiday shopping lists.

With consumers searching for holiday discounts through display ads, social media and email, Cisco Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group predict that both malvertising and email spam will be significant vectors for cyber crime this season — especially for mobile shoppers. This is worrisome for the simple reason that most mobile devices do not posses the ability to block many of these threats, leading to increased vulnerabilities as attackers seek profit gain during the busiest time for online commerce.

Through their research, Talos found that Android users are particularly vulnerable. Of the all Apple and Android OS blocks observed on the Cisco's Cloud Web Security (CWS) platform, the Talos team found that nearly 95% were Android-related. At the heart of the problem, many users are running significantly older versions of the Android OS, which lack the security updates for today’s most persistent threats. This holiday season, we advise that our mobile shoppers exercise additional caution.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday has arrived. Today, Microsoft has released their monthly set of security bulletins designed to address security vulnerabilities within their products. This month’s release contains 12 bulletins addressing 53 vulnerabilities. Four bulletins are rated critical and address vulnerabilities in Edge, Internet Explorer, Windows Journal, and Windows. The remaining eight bulletins are rated important and address vulnerabilities in .NET, IPsec, Kerberos, Lync/Skype for Business, NDIS, Office, SChannel, and Winsock.

Bulletins Rated Critical

Microsoft bulletins MS15-112 through MS15-115 are rated as critical in this month's release.

MS15-112 and MS15-113 are this month's Internet Explorer and Edge security bulletin respectively. In total, 25 vulnerabilities are addressed with four of them specifically affecting both IE and Edge. The remaining 21 vulnerabilities only affect Internet Explorer. The majority of the vulnerabilities that are resolved in this month's release are memory corruption defects. In addition, an ASLR bypass, an information disclosure vulnerability, and a couple of scripting engine flaws are also addressed.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Background

A mosaic made up of 1-800 tech support scam websites

The amount of fraudulent actors masquerading as legitimate tech support has been on the rise since 2008. According to David Finn, executive director at the Microsoft Cybercrime Center, tech support scammers have made nearly $1.5 billion off of 3.3 million unwitting victims just this year. These scammers typically convince the victim into allowing them access to his/her computer through remote control applications such as TeamViewer. They then present benign processes as malicious, or at times even spread malware themselves. Afterwards, they charge hundreds of dollars for the service.

There are several avenues through which these scammers reach their victims. One of the most insidious are pop-ups and websites asserting that the user's computer is riddled with viruses, and that the only way to fix the problem is to call a provided tech support number.

Talos has been monitoring the incessant creation of these fake tech support websites in order to better understand the way in which these scams operate. We decided to call a company ourselves for some reverse social engineering. Our experiment provided some interesting insights into the methods these scammers use to fool their victims as well as the infrastructure supporting their operations. In addition, we discovered a broad New Delhi-based scamming network employing multiple websites and VOIP phone numbers to carry out their duplicitous activities.